The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
By Matt Ridley, Harper, 368 pages, $29
What are we to make of the following developments?
- During the 16th century, the south end of London Bridge was adorned with spikes bearing the rotting heads of traitors, murderers and other criminals. Today, not only are there no heads on London Bridge, but capital punishment has been abolished in Britain for half a century.
- On February 14, 1876, Elisha Gray, a co-founder of the telegraph-equipment manufacturer Western Electric, filed with the United States Patent Office a memo describing “Instruments for Transmitting and Receiving Vocal Sounds Telegraphically” — the telephone. That same day, a lawyer representing a Boston University professor named Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent application for a device for “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically” — a telephone. The ensuing legal wrangle went on for years.
- The 20th century was marred by horrors: the mass slaughter of the First World War, the extermination camps of the Second World War, the tens of millions who died of starvation during China’s Great Leap Forward. Yet in this period the lives of billions of people grew immeasurably richer, safer and more comfortable, thanks to widespread economic growth, major scientific and medical advances, dramatic improvements in transportation and communications and a gradual waning of racism and other biases.
On the face of it, the disappearance of grisly totems of justice, the suspiciously coincidental patent filings and the inexorable rise in living standards in the face of organised disaster and depravity seem to have little to connect them. But Matt Ridley, the author of several well-regarded books on genetics and evolution, would argue that they are all of a piece — that each is the result of unplanned and undirected behaviour unfolding over time. The word for this is “emergent”, and with “The Evolution of Everything” Ridley has set out to construct a sort of grand unified theory of emergent behaviour.
The idea is simple, yet to many people disturbing: society evolves, as does the world in general, largely in a way neither we nor whatever god we conjure up has any real control over. This isn’t true of everything, but it’s true of far more than we care to believe. Highways are designed; traffic happens. Buildings are constructed; cities happen. Battles are strategised, troops mobilised, weapons deployed, but defeat or victory happens. “I want to ... get you to see past the illusion of design,” Ridley writes, “to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.”
He has set himself a tough task. As humans, we like to think we control events. We accept, at least in theory, that there is a degree of randomness in the world, but we still try to read some kind of portent into whatever happens. Any explanation is more comforting than the stark possibility that things occur without purpose. Even an inscrutable deity who deals out death and torment for reasons we can’t fathom is preferable to the profound disorientation of chance. We want — need — to believe that someone or something is in charge.
Darwin ran afoul of this mindset with a series of far-reaching observations that are still bitterly and irrationally contested today. Ridley goes further. Citing the British innovation theorist Richard Webb, he calls Darwin’s thesis the “special theory of evolution”, as opposed to a general theory that goes beyond biology “to society, money, technology, language, law, culture, music, violence, history, education, politics, God, morality”.
In his previous book, “The Rational Optimist”, Ridley took on doomsayers with the argument that things are getting better, thanks largely to market economies and other actions that take place without the benefit of central planning. Here he assails “creationism” in all its forms. The result, while not entirely convincing, offers a highly intelligent and bracingly iconoclastic view of the world. It forces us to see life through new eyes.
Ridley’s muse is not Darwin but Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher whose opus, “De Rerum Natura” (“On the Nature of Things”), may have helped jump-start the Renaissance. Lucretius, unlike Aristotle, was not amenable to Christian dogma: he celebrated earthly pleasures, and he insisted that every phenomenon has a natural — as opposed to supernatural — explanation. The recovery of his long poem in 1417, on a dusty shelf in a German monastery by an out-of-work papal secretary, was the subject of Stephen Greenblatt’s award-winning book “The Swerve”. But whereas Greenblatt, following Lucretius, defined a “swerve” as a sudden deviation from the expected course of things — the unearthing of a forgotten manuscript, for example — Ridley gives it a very different meaning.
To him, a swerve is what happens when someone devises a perfectly rational explanation only to succumb in the end to religious sleight-of-hand — as Newton did in insisting that his clockwork universe had to have been fashioned by “an intelligent and powerful being”, even if it ticked along on its own.
The world is full of such swerves, but try catching Ridley in one. You are more likely to find him holding fast to an idea even as it leads him towards the ditch. He is on solid ground in likening Adam Smith’s explanation of markets to Darwin’s account of evolution, and he makes a convincing case that language, marriage, monogamy, morality and even technology are also emergent phenomena, evolving without benefit of direction from above.
This would explain, among many other things, the curious coincidence of the two telephones and the absence of heads on London Bridge: ideas are in the air, and we prefer to get our gore at the movies now — but not because anyone decreed it. Ridley doesn’t mention the failure of Esperanto or the emergence of English as a common tongue, maybe because these are so obvious. But he does go into fascinating detail on the spontaneous evolution of public morals — also laid out by Adam Smith, in his 1759 book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”.
Government, religion, the internet — all are spontaneous and evolutionary in Ridley’s view, the laws of Moses notwithstanding. The trouble begins when he stops observing emergent phenomena and starts pumping for them as the ideal solution to any given problem.
He makes a good case that education would be better off without bureaucrats. But elsewhere he overreaches. His insistence that climate-change arguments are overwrought is rather suspect, especially for someone with a working coal mine on his country estate. Elsewhere, discussing the shortcomings of foreign aid, he notes that while Ghana and South Korea had roughly the same per capita income in the 1950s, the one that has gotten far more aid in the years since is vastly poorer today. True enough — but it hardly follows that, as he concludes, “the story of economic development is a bottom-up story. The story of lack of development is a top-down story.”
In fact, South Korea’s economy is both remarkably successful and heavily directed from above — unlike North Korea’s, which is staggeringly unsuccessful and even more heavily directed from above.
So the lesson is clear: emergent solutions succeed, and planned solutions fail — except when they don’t. It would be nice to learn what differentiates one situation from another. That Ridley hasn’t explained it hardly invalidates his larger point, that emergence is far more prevalent and more powerful than we think. But here too a deeper question remains: why are emergence and randomness so hard for people to accept? Could it be that the human brain is such a pattern-seeking organ that it can barely acknowledge unguided developments as an option? “The belief in the will and in the immortal soul themselves emerged as evolutionary consequences of how the brain changed,” Ridley writes. It’s a thought he might well have explored further.
–New York Times News Service
Frank Rose is a senior fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts and the author of “The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories”.
